Erring contractor to be prosecuted

AURANGABAD, May 1: With the court directing it to furnish details of the Mid-Day Meal scheme in the entire district following serious irregularities by a contractor detected last week, the District Supply Office DSO at the collectorate here is working furiously to collate records of supply and distribution of rice by the remaining four contractors as well. It is also culling details to prosecute the defaulting contractor, Dinesh Bowankar, who has failed to distribute thousands of quintals of rice to 732 primary schools in the district since January 1999. The three contracts secured by Bowankar for the 1998-99 academic year account for half the quantity of rice supplied to 1,930 schools by five contractors in the entire district. His contract itself covered 732 schools.

During a hearing last week, district officials had told the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay High Court that it would prosecute Bowankar, son-in-law of former deputy mayor Vijaykumar Mehr BJP. After the irregularities surfaced, police filedcharges against Bowankar, who has since secured ad interim anticipatory bail. Bowankar, who has been allegedly diverting rice under the scheme to the open market, has been charged by the police for criminal breach of trust. Sixty DSO employees are still weighing rice in four godowns belonging to Bowankar to assess the quantity he has procured from the Food Corporation of India but has hoarded instead. Bowankar was contracted to supply about 5,006 quintals per month to 732 schools. Apart from withholding quotas since January, 1999, the DSO has now discovered that Bowankar8217;s record for previous months is also pockmarked with irregualrities. The contractor, who is closely linked to senior BJP politicians, has already been fined Rs 22,000 since August as penalties for various kinds of irregularities. In August 1998, he was fined Rs 3,000, in September Rs 4,000, in November Rs 3,000 plus Rs 10,000 in the same month for remaining absent from the monthly meeting convened to monitor the scheme. He was also fined Rs2,000 in January 1999 for failing to lift his monthly quota from the FCI godown. Besides being charged under various sections in court, Bowankar now faces heavy penalties for failing to keep the terms of his three contracts. Accordingly, he will have to pay the equivalent of the market price for any quantity of rice he failed to deliver. While the government rate for rice supplied under the mid-day meal scheme is Rs 7.90, it fetches Rs 16 per kg in the open market, according to the DSO8217;s estimates.

Bowankar8217;s annual billing for transport and packaging for June 1998-April 1998 would have netted him Rs 15 lakh. While Rs 8.5 lakh had been paid to him in December, payments for January to March 1999, which amount to Rs 5.5 lakh, have now been frozen. Yet another installment, of Rs 1.5 lakh, for April has also been put on hold, officials say.

They reveal Bowankar had underquoted while bidding for the contracts last year and he would have not even been able to break even. While he had quoted Rs 56 per quintalwithin the municipal limits, he had quoted Rs 61 outside. Neither amount should have been below Rs 70, officials reveal.